1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an automatic translation and interpretation apparatus and method and, more particularly, to an automatic translation and interpretation apparatus and method, which allow persons who use different languages to easily communicate with each other.
2. Description of the Related Art
As well known in the art, an automatic translation and interpretation apparatus is a device for allowing persons who use different languages to communicate with each other using their own languages, and is configured to receive a speech signal, perform speech recognition, automatically translate the results of recognition into a second language, combine the results of the translation with speech, and output the resulting speech. However, since uttered sound immediately disappears, there is a problem in that it is impossible to directly reproduce a second language and utilize the reproduced second language for communication.
Further, since in the case of proper nouns having low frequency of use or in a noise environment, speech recognition performance is rapidly deteriorated, wherein there is a need to perform communication by directly entering a text sentence, or to directly utter the second language without using automatic interpretation.
Further, although an existing automatic translation engine is executed on text sentences and then sentences to be translated are assumed to be grammatically or semantically perfect, results transferred from a speech recognition engine to an automatic translation engine do not satisfy such assumptions, so that recognition error appearing in speech recognition negatively influences translation, thus resulting in a phenomenon in which the degree of error further increases after translation has been performed. In order to solve such a problem, an existing automatic interpretation apparatus attempts to solve such a problem by automatically retranslating the results of automatic translation into the second language into the first language and allowing a user to check the results.
In relation to this, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 10-2010-0068965 discloses technology entitled “Automatic interpretation apparatus and method.”